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Blogosphere doubling in size every six months

The blogosphere is 100 times larger than it was just three years ago, according to new figuresfrom weblog tracking site Technorati.

The site's latest 'State of the Blogosphere' report shows blogging activity is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every six and a half months. About 175,000 new weblogs were created every day in the last three years - the equivalent of two every second.

Technorati, which tracks over 50 million blogs, says total posting volume continues to rise, with 1.6 million new postings per day, or just under 19 posts per second.

The firm's CEO David Sifry wrote: "Can this possibly continue? Will I be posting about the 100 Millionth blog tracked in February of 2007? I can't imagine that things will continue at this blistering pace - it has got to slow down. After all, that would mean that there will be more bloggers around in seven months than there are bloggers around in total today.

"I shake my head as I am writing this - the only thing still niggling at my brain is that I'd have been perfectly confident making the same statement seven months ago when we had tracked our 25 millionth blog, and I've just proven myself wrong."

The report also includes details of the most prevalent posting times for English language blogs - the hours between 10am and 2pm Pacific time.

According to Technorati, there is an additional spike at around 5pm Pacific time. Major news events also prompt rises in postings. The start of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, for example, created a spike in average activity to 2.5 million posts per day.

The report also highlights the issue of splogging both for readers and tracking sites. "About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog," wrote Sifry.

There are still a hell of a lot of spam blogs in Technorati, making it highly difficult to wade through the guff when attempting to use the site for reputation monitoring, or to research a subject. I wonder what percentage of these 50m blogs are automated, sucking up RSS feeds and spitting them out as 'content'?

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